Pilot industrial production of natural pigments and corresponding standards.

An attempt for a commercial exploitation of the results constitutes another objective of the project. After standardization of the preparation of natural organic pigments, the formulated protocols will be used for the production of these materials, at an industrial (pilot) scale. Consequently, the pigments – typical for the Mediterranean area- produced by ancient recipes will be then available worldwide as reference samples for dyestuff analysis of art objects, targeting primarily (because of their origin) the preservation and conservation of the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean area. A similar effort, for large-scale massive production, will be performed for the corresponding standards, synthesized in sub-objective 1-2, that are not currently commercially available. The lack of standards is an important limitation for the researchers involved in the area of dye analysis. The supply of new standards, in addition to those which are already available, will expand the analytical capabilities of the scientific community. For this purpose the deliverable collection of reference materials, well documented (with composition, provenance and analysis data) and managed with a dedicated database system, which will constitute another outcome of this project, described below, will be accessible from the Euro-Mediterranean research community. Dissemination initiatives and discussions will be planed in order to establish modalities for metadata exchange and mutual accessibility among the present Mediterranean dyestuffs collection and other existing collections of dyes and colorants (catalogued, and some characterised), maintained and permanently enriched under the auspices namely of the NGL and ICN (500 natural and 600 synthetic).